Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal: What it means for food and farming
Is carbon farming the most economically viable way to keep climate catastrophe at bay?
A year ago, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender in Queens. Now the 29-year old is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, the Democrats’ biggest rising star since Barack Obama. She has pushed a decade-old idea called the Green New Deal to the political fore, which has major implications for the food system.
Carbon Farming
The overarching goal of the Green New Deal is to develop a carbon-neutral economy. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not coal-fired power plants and automobile tailpipes that emit the majority of greenhouse gases; it’s food production. Tillage, synthetic fertilizer and the manure lagoons of industrial livestock operations emit copious quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. However, agriculture also holds great potential to pull carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in soil and plants, just as natural forests and grasslands do. There are proven techniques to do this, collectively known as carbon farming, though it would take massive government incentives to redesign our agricultural system to become a net absorber of carbon. But there is a growing consensus that, compared to the investments required to transition to 100 percent renewable energy, electric vehicles and the like, an agricultural approach might actually be the fastest, cheapest and most practical way to dial down carbon emissions before it’s too late.
More Farmers
Another goal of the Green New Deal is to create millions of green-collar jobs by incentivizing the sort of economic activity that will put less carbon into the atmosphere instead of more. This means a lot more people working in agriculture. Carbon-friendly farming is, by nature, more labor intensive. It looks less like one guy managing 1,000 acres of corn and soybean on a tractor and more like a patchwork of small, diverse farms where a tightly managed integration of livestock, perennial forages and tree crops is maintained. One possible scenario is a green youth corps that subsidizes young people to spend time working in agriculture after graduation before moving into the broader workforce.
Food Justice
A third tenet of the Green New Deal is social equity. The idea is to not only create a carbon-neutral economy but also address issues of economic and racial justice in the process. In the food arena, this means devising a system where it’s not just the Whole Foods set who has access to low-carbon food. To a large extent, carbon farming practices overlap with other aspects of sustainable agriculture, which generally produces food that is more nutritious but also more expensive. The vision of the Green New Deal is to scale up those forms of agriculture and let carbon-spewing forms of agriculture fall by the wayside so that healthy, responsibly produced food isn’t just a niche trend but standard fare in every grocery store and restaurant, thereby eliminating the price differential.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal: What it means for food and farming
by Brian Barth, Modern Farmer
January 29, 2019
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
wow, IMHO, the entire idea is taken right out of communist writtings on collectivism and was used as early forms of control, amoung many others, to localize people and utilize them for government projects, none of which have been successful, communist organizations struggled for years, with many millions starving or dying under these kinds of concepts to eventually move, at least to measurable degress, away from them and utilized more western techniques,
As part of a long line of family farmers; crops, cattle, timber I am in favor of all the interest that sustainability and agriculture reform discussions always raise. However I am always discouraged because so often it is lead by idealists (AOC) that are so quick to point to others responsibilities and to invite more government oversite into a problem that they are so often the supporters of. For example the latest most “tweetable” activist AOC. They will point out all the benefits and gains of sustainability and responsible farming as they drive to the big box grocery store to… Read more »
If we don’t do something about the dwindling Bee population then all of this is for nothing.
I’m sorry…this is lunacy, as are most of the stunningly ill-formed utterances issued by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez (and her Socialist/Utopian ilk). She’s the one who claimed the earth will be destroyed in 12 years on the current path…? Right? Please people, try to objectively assess some of the proposals addressed in this article–perhaps reason and logic may still prevail. While you’re contemplating…have fun with these doomsday prophecies from the “leading thinkers” of the 70’s: 1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” 2. “We are… Read more »
We farm using less herbicides and insectisides every year. We rotate crops, use ground cover, and use some of our cow manure to feritilize our gardens. We live in central Nebraska and have a small farm (less than 1000 acres) and a small cow/calf herd (28) that graze our virgin pasture. We do what we can but we are no longer farmers but agribusiness workers. We want to be farmers and nurture our earth but our crops have to be profitable.
We all need to be growing food. If you have a yard then some of it should be veggie garden and fruit trees/shrubs. If you don’t have a yard then potted plants on your balcony. And those who do have land, grow lots and lots of food items to share with relatives and neighbors. We could all eat very well, if we all GREW SOMETHING!!!
Amazing!!! I am a tiny little frog in a very big pond pushing for a return to sustainable farm practices. It’s great to see others out there, pushing for the same way to live, sustain and thrive
So what are some examples of the incentives that would be required?
According to the EPA, transportation and power generation are still the largest sources of greenhouse gasses. but there’s another gorilla in the room: soil health. I read Dr. David Montgomery’s Book, Growing a Revolution and it’s message that we need to transition to a majority no-till system as fast as we can go. The restoration of our soils is critical if we are going to feed an ever growing population while maintaining biodiversity and getting off of agricultural chemicals.
some are wondering about a community of like minded people. There is a new Facebook group called ‘Climate Victory Gardeners’ started by the ‘www.greenamerica.org’ which also has a page on Facebook. They definitely would welcome more members, since they are just getting started. Check it out.
Green America has a climate victory garden map you can add your garden to and has information on how to climate garden